Hi! We’re looking into making it easier for people to participate in our IRC chatrooms, and related to that, it would be helpful to know what (group) messaging/chat systems people are currently using.
0 voters
Personally I mainly use WhatsApp, but I wouldn’t want a MusicBrainz WhatsApp group, so I didn’t vote for it.
Apart from this forum, I would only use any kind of chat for quick questions whenever I have them, and WhatsApp and similar apps are pretty much always on. IRC is quite convenient, because you can just hop on whenever you need it and you don’t need any software or account for it (the web chat thing works fine, though it could use a bigger font).
This is not what the poll is asking for/about though. It’s asking what people are using, not what they would want to use for MusicBrainz things. I don’t want to use Steam to talk MusicBrainz, but I still use Steam, so I put that down in the poll.
I can’t find “None of the Above”, so I also could not vote.
Whatever system you choose, ideally it would be good if it allows anon \ temp accounts where non-technical people can just walk in and ask a question without creating an account. I am not the only person on this forum who does not like the way companies like WhatsApp would treat our private data.
Being able to read the IRC History Logs without an account is something I have often done. That is a great feature.
A suggestion I would make is to make the IRC access to you guys easier by linking it from the forum and main website in a more obvious and accessible way.
I like the idea of IRC as it is you guys controlling the data. The only problem is actually finding our way into the chat room. 
I went to look just now to see how anon access works but could not find the IRC link. Ah - found it now on the Contact Us page, but login page seems broken in some way as I can’t login as the button is not working…
Integrate that chat better. Make it more easily accessible than being a few lines at the bottom of a Contact Us page. Let us login with the same MusicBrainz account, but please make sure it is always you guys who are in charge of the data.
There is “Something else” as an option.
Again, this is not a poll to choose another system!
It is only a poll to get some kind of idea of what systems are in use by people in the community. The people we might want to reach with a potential bridge (which, again, is not what this topic/poll is about!) are not necessarily the people who are already active in the community (e.g., by using this forum).
Okay, have now ticked that one and the comment is “None of the above”. 
IRC doesn’t inherently require any registration. Due to a spam attack nick registration was temporarily mandatory but that’s no longer the case it seems. Channel mode r isn’t set for #musicbrainz or #metabrainz
All you need is a client and an unused nick.
Currently MeB uses freenode for IRC. Metabrainz doesn’t have much control over them AFAIK other than e.g. Freso being part of the staff.
webchat.freenode.net uses reCaptcha. You need to pass the test.
Clearly I failed as it never showed me the captcha. I am a robot…
Either that or it got upset by Vivaldi \ Ublock Origin \ Privacy Badger \ Pi Hole \ Sun Spots \ or some randomness. (Don’t let this drag us OT - next time I need to get in I will be fine)
As to the ticket - that is still too small. If you want people to talk to you MAKE IT BIG AND LOUD AND EASY AND NOT TOO GEEKY. 
It is also nice to see you on a simple platform like IRC as there is so much history for us to read if we want to. Just seems that Freenode is a nice polite place. Ideal IMHO. Even better if @freso is involved behind the scenes.
I have checked IRC. But I only use it for MB, and a few seconds at a time, about twice a week through https://webchat.freenode.net/
I monitor my nickname in web chatlogs.
But I like it like that. 
Just a note that my being (volunteer) staff for freenode is not related to my (paid) work for MetaBrainz. So far I haven’t had any conflict of interest (and have been sure to pass e.g. MetaBrainz project cloak requests to other freenode staff people), but it is something I am aware of.
On a side note, there’s already an (unofficial I guess?) MetaBrainz channel on Matrix (which you can join by clicking here). Since Matrix and IRC channels can easily be bridged, doing so could be an easy way to have some more people participating.
There has also been an unofficial Telegram group for quite some time:
It’s bridged to #musicbrainz-telegram on freenode
I primarily use Signal, but I have accounts on Discord and GroupMe for specific things. And Messenger as needed.
About the Telegram group. At the 2019 MetaBrainz Summit in Barcelona, we talked about bridging the unofficial Telegram chat to the official MetaBrainz chat. One blocker to this was support for the [off] prefix to not send messages across the bridge. This feature was recently added to the bridge software:
So, technically we could look at bridging the existing Telegram chat (~40 people) to the #musicbrainz IRC channel officially. I could help facilitate this work as the maintainer of the existing MusicBrainz Telegram bridge but I need permission from MetaBrainz staff to carry this out. I don’t want to add a bot to the main channel when it is not expected.